Contributing to the Mayibuye Archives in South Africa

Devil’s Peak, right, is one of the mountains that form a dramatic backdrop to Cape Town, South Africa’s second-most populous city. Originally settled by the Dutch as a naval ship supply station, Cape Town today has a population of roughly 3.7 million and

The prison cell at Robben Island where Nelson Mandela spent 18 years. From within the 8-by-7-foot cell, Mandela remained defiant against apartheid and committed to the idea that no one is born to hate.

The Bo-Kaap, one of Cape Town’s colorful districts near the city center. Formerly known as the Malay Quarter, the Bo-Kaap is considered the historic cultural center of Cape Malay, the community of people who arrived in South Africa in the 17th century as

A map of Robben Island. Just a few miles off the coast from Cape Town, the island has over time served as a leper colony, an asylum and most famously as the historic home to a maximum-security prison for South Africa’s political prisoners. Today, the isla

Some of the former prisoner housing quarters at Robben Island. Today, the island is a popular tourist attraction and has been declared a national heritage site for South Africa. In 1999, UNESCO declared it a World Heritage Site.

(Kids waving): Children greet visitors to the Masiphumelele township outside of Cape Town. Twenty years after ushering in democracy, South Africa’s citizens suffer from one of the world’s widest gaps between rich and poor.

The front page of The New Age, a newspaper that became a leading voice against apartheid, is shown at the Mayibuye Archives at the University of Western Cape, in Cape Town. The goal of a joint MU-UWC effort is to help digitize the aging archives to ensure

Yusuf Gabru shows a hand-written letter offering encouragement from Nelson Mandela to University of Missouri professor Randall Smith and to MU students on the trip to South Africa. An activist in education in the 1970s and 1980s, Gabru suffered imprisonme

Jeffrey Arendse, principal of the Kalksteenfontein Primary School in Kalksteenfontein Township, Cape Town, talks to MU students about the challenges of providing education. “They (the children) emulate what they see in the streets,” Arendse says. “ “The m

A great white shark appears on the port side of the expedition vessel, The White Shark. Up to five people wearing wetsuits can fit into the cage in the foreground, which is lowered into the sea, allowing close-up encounters with great whites.

MU graduate student Elliott Stam holds out his arm to allow a vulture to land and dine on raw meat at the Moholoholo Wildlife Rehabilitation Centre. Animals injured by trappers and hunters are brought to the sanctuary to be treated and rehabilitated, with

It’s been 20 years since the fall of apartheid in South Africa in 1994. For the last year now, students and faculty here at the University of Missouri have been assisting the University of Western Cape in preserving an archive of thousands of photographs, films, artifacts, oral histories and other historical documents related to the struggle for freedom during apartheid.

The Mayibuye archive is housed at the Main Library of the University of Western Cape in Cape Town and Robben Island. Western Cape played a key role in the struggle against apartheid and was the only “colored” university in the country. Many of the thought leaders in the administration of Nelson Mandela came from the university.

Lauren Langille, Graduate Student at MU

Kevin Drew, Graduate Student at the University of Missouri

The MU College of Education’s School of Information Science & Learning Technologies and the University of Missouri Libraries is working with archivists in Western Cape to digitize much of the archive and make it available online. The two universities have also had a long-running partnership that stretches back into the 1980s.

Randy Smith, Professor of Convergence Journalism at MU

The Missouri School of Journalism’s role in the archive project is to tell the stories contained in the archive, and we largely talked about that effort on KBIA's Intersection this week.